
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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ADDRESSES TO WOMEN 
ENGAGED IN CHURCH WORK 



BY THE 
RIGHT REVEREND THE BISHOP OF 



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CONTENTS 



The Great Exemplar . 


3 


The Realm of Order . 


. 27 


Ends and Instruments 


. 67 


Illusions and Ideals . 


• 95 


Wholeness .... 


. 123 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



THE Addresses which follow need, 
rather than an introduction, an 
apology. Of their crudeness and im- 
perfection no one can be half so 
sensible as he who now sees them in 
the cold light of print. Prepared amid 
the pressure of large and anxious tasks, 
away from books, and without leisure 
for reflection ; wholly unwritten, save 
as to a few brief heads, and delivered, 
usually, without a single note, they 
have been taken down by a short-hand 
reporter, and appear here with all their 
original defects of form and diffusive- 
ness of style. I wish I could believe that 
the judgment of others, who have 



VI INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 

asked for them in this more perma- 
nent form, were not more friendly than 

« 

critical, and I can only pray that, if 
they shall be found to contain a single 
helpful suggestion, it may be accepted 
as at least partially excusing the temer- 
ity of their publication. 

Henry C. Potter. 
Lent, 1887. 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

An Address delivered in Grace Church, New 
York, on Tuesday, November 27, 1883, at the Ser- 
vice for Women engaged in Church work. 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 



IT is a matter of heartfelt thankful- 
ness to me that I am permitted to 
meet you here to-day. We shall be 
stronger, I am sure, for our common 
tasks — for in a very real sense yours 
and mine are one — for looking into one 
another's faces, and recognizing that 
closest bond which binds us together 
in service to our common Lord. Such 
a gathering as this helps us to make 
our communion of service a more real 
and inspiring fact, and to remind us 
that, ho\yever far apart may lie our vari- 
ous fields of work, the work is one, and 
the workers one, in the motive and the 
Master that inspire them. 
3 



4 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

Our communion of service, I say, and 
that it is a communion of service that 
associates us we may not venture to 
forget. There is a line of reflection 
which would seem, at the first view, 
to be that which, most of all, is appro- 
priate to this occasion. In our various 
relations to those societies, guilds, sis- 
terhoods, and the like, which are repre- 
sented here, we are much engrossed of 
necessity in the tasks to be done and 
the ends to be accomplished. In each 
of these there is much detail, much 
that is of the nature of earthly busi- 
ness, much that is concerned with ma- 
terial means and resources. And, busy 
about these — absorbed with questions 
of finance or charitable housekeeping, 
buying clothing, or packing a box for 
a missionary, dressing a wound, dis- 
pensing an alms, or washing some poor 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 5 

waif of the garret or the street into 
something like outer whiteness, if no 
more, it may be said that we are easily 
tempted to forget the higher ends of 
all Christian work, to forget that " the 
life is more than meat and the body 
than raiment " — to forget that our ser- 
vice itself is, or should be, a nurture of 
our own souls in the life of prayer and 
faith, and saintly speech and thoughts, 
and instead, like her whom her Lord 
gently but distinctly admonished, to 
be " cumbered with much serving/* 

Believe me, I do not forget it. That 
other side of a Christian life which is 
not work but worship, not activity but 
stillness and upward-looking expecta- 
tion, not contact with men but com- 
munion with God, we are all in danger 
of neglecting. Even the highest and 
most sacred functions (none knows it 



6 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

better than he who addresses you) may 
be in danger of becoming a mechanical 
and task-work routine, and if any one 
of us is to be saved from that perfunc- 
tory and secular temper which sees in 
our service only an engagement to be 
kept, so much piece-work to be finished 
when it is called for, it must be by com- 
ing back, from time to time, into those 
upper airs where the soul may hearken 
and be still. 

But while this peril is to be distinctly 
recognized, there is another as real 
and often more dangerous, because less 
easily discovered. History has been 
written in vain, if it has not taught us 
that nothing is easier than to antagonize 
the life of devotion and the life of service, 
and to exalt the former as more sacred 
and more needful than the latter. That 
legend of the kneeling monk in his cell, 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 7 

to whom, as he prays, there comes a 
vision of his Lord flashing out upon 
the bare, white wall of his chamber, 
and looking down upon him with in- 
effable tenderness and benignity, was 
written for all time. He is kneeling, 
you will recollect, and gazing upon the 
vision with wrapt devotion, when the 
harsh clang of the bell at the monastery- 
gate breaks upon his ears. He knows 
well enough what it means. A stranger, 
belated, needy, and importunate, is 
knocking for admission. Shall he go 
and let him in, or stay ? Shall he miss 
the vision, or the service ? And while 
he hesitates the bell rings again, and 
regretfully remembering his vow not to 
be heedless of the cry of any poor man, 
he hastens to obey its summons, ren- 
ders the needed service, and returns 
sadly to his cell. The vision, he is 



8 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

sure, will be ended r and the Gracious 
Presence gone. But no ; it shines down 
upon him in fuller, nearer beauty, and 
as he looks he hears a voice, " If thou 
hadst staid, I had fled." 

The parable is of eternal application. 
The Church has had in all ages the 
quietist as well as the busy-body, the 
pietist and the mystic as well as the 
philanthropist and the secularist. How 
many sermons have we heard about the 
sisters, Mary and Martha — sermons 
which, with all their eloquence, missed 
the point of their story, and misread 
the words of their Lord. For it was 
not that Martha toiled that her Master 
rebuked her, but that she toiled at the 
wrong time and for a wrong end. Who 
knows at what tasks Mary had wrought 
early and effectively, that when the 
Guest came, she might be free for that 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 9 

truer hospitality which consists not in 
fussiness, but in companionship ? Nay, 
who does not know that hers was the 
truer serving which waited upon her 
Lord? 

11 Ye servants of the Lord, 
Each in your office wait, 
Observant of His heavenly word, 
And watchful at His gate. 
****** 

11 Watch, 'tis your Lord's command, 
And while we speak He 's near ; 
Mark the first signal of His hand, 
And ready, all appear." 

So runs the Ember hymn, and we 
may not miss its meaning. Service and 
devotion are not the antagonists of each 
other. Rightly viewed they are parts 
of one symmetrical whole, a life in 
which the one interpenetrates the other, 
and in which the hearkening ear and 
the watchful eye are sometimes as true 
a service, as real a work for God and 



IO THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

our fellow-men, as the busiest task and 
the most exhausting labors. A student 
of nature is strolling through a field, 
and the laborer who watches him idly 
passing by, sighs in envy of his indolent 
and easy life. But in truth that observ- 
ant eye, those trained powers of dis- 
crimination and discovery, are taking 
in the minutest details of his surround- 
ings, and deducing from them principles 
which, in their application, shall make 
the laborers task lighter, and all the 
world richer. A commander is moving 
to and fro, absorbed and silent, upon 
his quarter-deck ; and the man at the 
mast-head looks down upon him with a 
vexing sense of the contrast between 
his own hard and exposed life and that 
other which seems so much easier. But 
we know which of the two is even then 
the more laborious, which brain and 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. It 

eye and ear are on the keener and 
more constant tension ; in one word, 
who is the toiler at once the more con- 
stant and the more indefatigable. 

And all this is of value only as it 
leads us into the presence of the Great 
Exemplar. What was the story of the 
earthly ministry of Christ ? There is a 
little volume by a non-conformist divine 
of England, 1 called "A Day with Christ." 
I wish we might all read it. It is simply 
the story of a single day's work by the 
Worker of Nazareth, as told in the Gos- 
pels, and it is safe to assume that it is a 
specimen of the greater part of His 
brief and crowded ministry. I may 
not rehearse it here, but I may remind 
you how few, after all, were the pauses 
in that ministry. Undoubtedly Christ 
had His moments of stillness. But if 
1 The Rev. Samuel Cox. 



12 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

the story of the Gospels is to be be- 
lieved, how brief they were ! How He 
hastens, unrestingly, from town to 
town ! How no privacy of friend's 
house, or entertainer's guest-table pro- 
tects Him from the sinners and suf- 
ferers who throng to touch and hear 
Him! And yet, shot through and 
through was all this service with the 
silver thread of a Divine calmness and 
peace. His tasks never flurry Him, 
His work never masters Him, His en- 
gagements never enslave Him. On the 
most urgent errands, He yet turns aside 
and interrupts them. In the most 
tragic moments (think of the servant of 
the High Priest whose ear Peter cut 
off) He stops to heal and restore ! 

Now, when we look at such a life as 
this, we find ourselves asking, " What 
was its supreme spring and spell ? " If 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 1 3 

you will turn to the fifth chapter of St. 
John's Gospel, and look at the 17th 
verse, I think you will find it. Says 
Jesus : " My Father worketk hitherto, 
and I work." Hold these words in your 
thoughts for a few moments, and, mean- 
time, go along with me in the next step 
of our meditation. 

We sometimes think of the work of 
Christ in the world as if, in its human 
experiences, it was somehow wholly 
different from our own. But it was 
not. What are our commonest experi- 
ences in our work — commonest and 
most disheartening ? 

(a) Weariness, I think you will agree 
with me, is one of them. With vigor- 
ous powers, and light heart, and facile 
hand, service is a challenge which we 
gladly and almost exultantly accept. 
But the day comes — perhaps, with 



14 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

some of us it has never been absent — 
when the brain is dull, and the hands 
tired, and the nerves jarred, and sore, 
and shrinking. And then we say : 
" There was One who could say, * My 
meat is to do the will of Him that sent 
Me ■ ; but if He could say that, how 
different He must have been from me ! 
My spirit is willing, but oh, my flesh is 
very weak — yes, and weary. Could 
He ever have known anything like 
this ? " Listen, my sister. 

" And He must needs go through 
Samaria. Then cometh He to a city 
. . . called Sychar. . . . Now, 
Jacobs well was there. Jesus, there- 
fore, being wearied with His journey, 
sat thus on the well." Did you ever 
think of the force of that little word 
" thus " ? Being wearied, He sat " thus." 
How vivid and masterly the touch that, 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. I 5 

in this way, lets us see the whole scene ! 
Jesus was wearied, and He showed it. 
He sat thus — that is, as one who is 
wearied, with the droop of fatigue, and 
the languor of exhaustion, on the well. 
Tired ? Ah ! yes. He knew what it 
was to be tired, and to find the frail 
instrument falter before its mighty tasks. 
Your experience is not unlike His. 
Into the valley of that humiliation, if it 
be a humiliation, He has gone before 
you ! 

{b) Again : another experience com- 
mon to all of us in work for Christ is 
that discouragement outside of our- 
selves, which we find in the stubbornness 
of that with which our work is concerned. 
Who shall estimate the enthusiasms 
dampened, the lofty purposes aban- 
doned, the large and noble plans left 
unfulfilled, because, when we addressed 



1 6 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

ourselves to our task, we found circum- 
stances so unyielding, the hearts of men 
so obdurate, the sympathies of Christian 
disciples so cold and irresponsive, the 
leaders in Israel, even, to whom we had 
so confidently turned, indifferent or sus- 
picious ? There are those here this 
morning — I know it, though they have 
never told me so — who have said to 
themselves, " What was the good of it 
all ? my sacrifices, my prayers, my plans? 
I had an opportunity ; I gladly owned 
the call that came to me in some provi- 
dential opening ; I was willing to spend 
and be spent for Christ. And what did 
I meet ? From those to whom I went, 
in my Master's name, and with His 
message, a chilling and repellent wel- 
come, or worse still, a sneer and a gibe. 
From those who were rich in this world's 
goods, a dole or a refusal. From my 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 1 7 

fellow-servants in the same household 
of Faith, a prophecy of my failure, 
or a jest at my fanaticism. I have been 
willing to work for Christ, but I have 
found neither welcome nor help, and I 
am simply discouraged, and what is 
worse, half faithless of good or of any 
triumph of the Truth. " 

There is no exaggeration, I believe, 
in such a picture as that ; and yet its 
shadows are not half so dark as those 
of that age of the world to which Christ 
came. It is the pre-eminent distinction 
of His ministry that the Church and 
the priesthood, the scholars and the 
cultivated, the wealthy and the emi- 
nent, each one of them, as a class, op- 
posed to Him a blank, dead wall of 
stubborn indifference. It was not that 
they could not understand Him ; they 
did not want to. " Ye will not believe 



1 8 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

My word," this was what He said of 
them, and He spoke that which He 
knew. The obstacle to His welcome 
was in the will — obstinate, antagonis- 
tic, unbelieving. And yet, in the end, 
He triumphed. There came a day when 
they who had mocked Him yielded, 
and when " a great company of the 
priests were obedient to the faith." 
There came a day when the Cross con- 
quered pride, when love melted resist- 
ance, when the truth took captive the 
soul. 

My sisters, you are working with the 
same Cross as your symbol, and with 
the same truth as your inheritance. 
Hold them up with hands nerved by 
faith, and with hearts on fire with love, 
and God will give you your hire ! 

(c) Once more, and as illustrative of 
other experiences common, I imagine, 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 1 9 

to all of us, there is that discourage- 
ment which comes to us not from op- 
position, nor yet from weariness, but 
from those who are our fellow-workers. 
You have a purpose, lofty and helpful, 
as you are persuaded, and those who 
are associated with you cannot see its 
merit. It is not that they are indiffer- 
ent — you know that they are not ; it is 
not that they distrust you — you are 
sure of their regard ; but their eyes are 
holden that they cannot see. Some 
film of prejudice, or, oftener still, some 
intellectual incapacity to understand 
you (one of the hardest things, I think, 
to bear), makes it simply impossible for 
them to follow your thought or to enter 
into it. It is not hostility, it is simple 
dulness. Or, again, it may be that they 
do comprehend you, but they are hon- 
estly at issue with you. " Far be it 



20 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

from Thee, Lord," says St. Peter, when 
his Master foretells His death. The 
Apostle knew what his Lord proposed, 
and he honestly doubted its expedi- 
ency. And to the companionship of 
such men Christ was doomed, as we 
should say, during His whole earthly 
ministry. It would be simple trifling 
with the facts to pretend that they un- 
derstood Him, even at the Last Supper, 
or that they were not honestly at issue 
with Him as to the expediency of His 
purpose. 

And yet, He waited — and wrought. 
The work did not cease because His 
fellow-workers could not comprehend 
it. Toiling and suffering, dying and 
rising again, He who said " I must 
work, the night cometh," went on in 
that work till the end, that glorious 
end, when it came to be with all, as at 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 21 

first it was with two of them, that 
" their eyes were opened and they knew 
Him " ! Kneel down, then, O discour- 
aged one, and when even your nearest 
and dearest in the Lord cannot com- 
prehend you, trace His lonely footsteps 
in the way, and strive yourself to walk 
in them. 

But how? In such a life there was 
some mighty and sustaining power. 
What was it, and how can we make it 
ours ? To that question we have, I be- 
lieve, the answer in those words which 
I have quoted in St. John's Gospel: 
"My Father worketh hitherto, and I 
work." Sit down and read the words 
of Christ in the four Gospels, and see 
how full they are of the sense of God 
— God working in nature (" Behold the 
lilies," "He maketh His sun to rise," 
" He sendeth rain," etc.) ; in events, as 



22 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 

He turns back for Israel the half-forgot- 
ten page of Hebrew history and traces 
through its tangled skein the golden 
thread of a providential ordering; and 
finally, in Himself, as when He says 
" I and my Father are one " ; " The 
work that I do, I do in My Father's 
Name " ; " The Father loveth the Son, 
and sheweth Him all things that Him- 
self doeth." In the ministry of Christ 
there is an all-pervading consciousness 
of a Divine partnership, and, flowing 
out of it, a calm and serene confidence 
that He who was working in and with 
Him, would bring Him, let what might 
delay or hinder, to the hour when, His 
task complete, His toil all done and 
ended, He could say " I have finished 
the work which Thou gavest Me to 
do." 
That was His secret. It must be 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 23 

ours ; and it may be. One with Him 
in the fellowship of the Father, confi- 
dent with his confidence who had 
caught so truly the spirit of his Lord 
that he could say " Beloved, now are 
we the sons of God," and with that 
other who wrote " We then as workers 
together with Him, beseech you," we 
too may not fear to say " My Father 
worketh hitherto, and I work." His 
lamp shines through my reason. His 
compassion stirs my pity. His cour- 
age nerves my will. My task, my 
work, do I call it ? Nay, it is His 
more than it is mine. He and He only 
can make me know the meaning of the 
words : " I can do all things through 
Christ which strengtheneth me," and 
He has given me " an Example that I 
should follow His steps." 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 

An address delivered in St. Ann's Church, New 
York, on Monday, February i, 1886, at the Service 
for Women engaged in Church work. 



25 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 



I AM to speak to you this morning, 
in accordance with the notice al- 
ready given to you, of the Realm of 
Order ; and in reference to the large 
subject which that phrase suggests to 
us, we may well remind ourselves at 
the outset, how we who live in the 
world of to-day, and who call ourselves 
Christian people, are a part of those 
two great realms or kingdoms, each one 
of which has so much to do with our 
happiness and welfare. 

We are a part, first of all, of the Realm 

or Kingdom of Nature. The eye with 

which I look into your faces at this 

moment, the ear with which you hear 

27 



28 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

my voice, the feet which have brought 
you hither, the brain which has followed 
these services so far — all these are a 
part of the great realm, the first stone 
of which was laid when " In the begin- 
ning God created the heaven and the 
earth/* And when, after a long rest, 
that creation was followed by those 
successive fiats or commands, which 
called light and the lower forms of 
vegetation and animal life into being, 
and which crowned the whole with the 
existence and the powers and the 
sovereignty of man, this was the in- 
auguration of the Realm of Order. 

Believe, if you choose — for I think 
that a larger study will adequately 
reconcile the two seemingly opposite 
views of the subject — that these suc- 
cessive steps of creation were accom- 
plished, in some sort or other, by a 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 29 

progress or development of life from 
lower forms into higher: nevertheless, 
the meaning of what we know as nature 
to us here to-day is one and the same. 
Once there was chaos, darkness, seeth- 
ing forces which had not been called 
into organized life, and had not been 
placed in fixed relation to other forces ; 
and then, as we should say, one day, 
there came a Voice. He who is Him- 
self a God, as the Apostle names Him, 
" not of confusion," but of order and 
of " peace," because of order in all the 
ages, spoke at last, and this chaos 
vanished, and the darkness disappeared, 
that in the place of it there might 
appear that thing which we know as 
the Realm of Order. 

Think, for one moment, of one single 
feature of that realm, as illustrative of 
the whole. Think of the law that parts 



30 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

day from night, and makes the succes- 
sion of darkness and light. Suppose, if 
so impossible a thing were supposable, 
that, instead of the recurrence of day- 
light and darkness, in accordance with 
a law of fixed and sure succession, by 
which you can tell just as accurately 
when the sun will rise a year from to- 
day, as to-morrow — you and I were 
left to the uncertainties of a vagrant 
daylight and a vagrant darkness ; a life 
in which day and night alternated 
irregularly, spasmodically, without a 
law, and without any premonition or 
foreknowledge on our part. Think 
what it would be to undertake to order 
your daily life, to minister in the 
things in which ministry is meted to 
you, if, first of all, you could not place 
your hand upon a law of order in the 
realm of nature, and say, " This thing 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 3 1 

will be, because it has been, and on 
this fixed and orderly succession, on 
this due and harmonious proportion, 
of day and of night, I may count in 
the work that I have to do in the 
world." 

What now was proclaimed on the 
first morning when the sun dawned for 
the first time on the world, and when 
chaos vanished to give place to order 
and to those great laws of nature and 
of life of which you and I are a part ? 
This : that the world was to be the 
home of a creature who was to find in 
it a Realm of Order. 

And again ; what was proclaimed, 
when, centuries afterwards, another 
kingdom came into being as the Church 
of the Lord Jesus Christ? One day, a 
far-off land is roused from its lethargy 
by a cry. There is a voice heard in 



32 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

the wilderness ; there is a solitary man, 
a single personality, lifting up a protest 
against the sins, the lethargy, the dark- 
ness, the subterfuges of the time. And 
that is all at first ; because in the world 
of humanity the first thing is not or- 
ganized society, but the individual; 
first of all, that separate and sacred 
personality which in the eye of God is 
the image of His own being, and the 
likeness of Himself. And so, first of 
all, there is John the Baptist ; not a 
church ; not a society ; not a commu- 
nity or fellowship of any sort ; but one 
man, setting himself against the drift 
of his time, kindling other men into 
life and light and fire, by the power 
with which he speaks. And this is a 
perfect illustration — the ministry of 
this man John the Baptist — of what 
we may call at once the power and 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 33 

the weakness of individualism in the 
world. 

For, following the ministry of John 
the Baptist, we find that, when the 
Apostles came on one occasion to Eph- 
esus, there were those who had been 
baptized with the baptism of John, and 
who had not so much as heard whether 
there was any Holy Ghost. They had 
been set on fire by a new truth, and 
then they had wandered apparently out 
of the influence of that which followed 
the preaching of John the Baptist ; they 
had not been brought into the associa- 
tions of the Church of Christ ; they 
had not been baptized in the Name of 
its Divine Founder, and they were out- 
side the means of grace, and therefore 
necessarily largely outside the hope of 
salvation. 

But after John the Baptist there 



34 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

comes Another, who from first to last 
reveals Himself as the Prophet, Teacher, 
Founder, and Ordainer of order. He 
speaks of a Kingdom, of His disciples 
as the children of a King. Little by 
little, taking up that interest and curi- 
osity and alarm which had been awak- 
ened by His predecessor, He lifts it to 
a higher level, to something more than 
curiosity, or interest, or alarm, to that 
which we name discipleship ; and when 
He has gathered about Him a little 
band of men infused with His own 
spirit and converted to His own con- 
victions, what does He do but send 
these men out to baptize in the Name 
of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And 
thus was organized a Divine Society, 
to create in the world a brotherhood 
which should be ruled according to the 
principles of a divine order, and to lay 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 35 

the broad foundations of that great fel- 
lowship or Kingdom which we name 
to-day as the Church of God. 

Now, when you come to read the 
letters which the men whom Christ 
sent out to preach His Gospel wrote 
to the Churches which they founded, 
nothing is more significant than to see 
how instantly, and therefore all the 
more suggestively, this thought of or- 
derliness, of setting things in order, of 
Christianity itself as a divine order in 
the world, comes into view. When the 
Apostle who had founded the Church 
in Corinth is writing in that first letter 
of his to that Church, concerning the 
Sacrament of the Lord's Supper ; after 
he had rebuked those who had con- 
verted the Supper into an occasion of 
revelry and festivity, what is that in- 
junction with which he concludes? 



36 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

" And if any man hunger, let him eat 
at home : that ye come not together 
unto condemnation. And the rest will 
I set in order when I come." l 

Again, when he sends out the men 
who were to preside over the infant 
Church he himself had planted, and to 
build up the handful of believers into 
something more than a little vagrant 
band in the waste of paganism, what is 
the charge he lays upon them ? Listen 
to the words that he writes to that 
Apostle whom he sends to preside over 
the churches in Crete : 

" For this cause left I thee in Crete, 
that thou shouldest set in order the 
things that are wanting, and ordain el- 
ders in every city, as I had appointed 
thee." 2 

In other words, the new religion was 
1 I Cor. xi., 34. * Titus i., 5. 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 37 

not merely a new enthusiasm ; the new 
truth was not merely a new philosophy ; 
the new Teacher not merely a new 
teacher, but a King, even as in the face 
of Pontius Pilate He owned. 1 He had 
come, not to leave an orphan Church 
in the world ; He had come to found 
a Divine Kingdom ; and the very es- 
sence of a kingdom, whether it be 
human or divine, is that it shall be 
founded upon principles of order, and 
upbuilt upon laws which are fixed and 
determined from the beginning. 

Surely, a moment's reflection will 
persuade us that that which was so 
necessary in the beginning, is no less 
necessary, nay, far more necessary, to- 
day. For, what is the difference be- 
tween that condition of society to 
which the Christian religion came, and 

1 St. John xviii., 37. 



38 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

the condition of society as you and I 
know it to-day ? On one thing I think 
we will all be agreed, and that is, that 
life is enormously fuller now than then. 
The various agencies which have opened 
the mind of man to contact with other 
men, the various scientific discoveries, 
like steam, and electricity, and print- 
ing, have somehow multiplied life, so 
that the points of contact and relation 
with our fellow-men have been in- 
creased almost indefinitely. 

But what are the consequences of 
such a condition of things? The voices 
that speak to us, the claims that ad- 
dress themselves to us, the appeals that 
reach our sympathy, must needs be no 
less multiplied, and so they are. What 
most torments people, with sympathies 
and aptitudes for doing service for 
Christ in His Church to-day, is the 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 39 

very multiplicity of the claims upon 
their time, and attention, and emo- 
tions. How constantly our ears are 
tried with the voices that come to us 
saying, " Come over and help us " — 
those cries of sorrow or want, that rise 
up around us on every hand ! And 
therefore it is, that if we are to do the 
work of Christ, without wasting our 
forces and throwing away our strength 
and frittering our energies in the doing 
of it, we must, first of all, recognize the 
inevitable necessity of being subject to 
the Realm of Order. 

What, now, are the conditions of that 
realm ? 

I. The first which I would name is 
Discrimination. This is a condition 
which lies at the threshold of any true 
fealty to the Realm of Order. In the 
matter of Christian work, the first ques- 



40 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

tion, in other words, for you, for me, 
to decide, is this: There are some 
things which are worth doing, and there 
are some things which are not worth 
doing. There are a great many other 
things, it may be, which are worth doing, 
if we were sure of absolute leisure, if we 
had no home ties or other claims upon 
our attention, and if our obligations 
were so isolated that we could draw 
a sharp line around them and ignore 
everything outside of them ; but that is 
impossible. And so, the first condition 
of service for one who would serve God 
is, that he or she shall recognize that 
there are certain things which have a 
superior claim, and which must be 
done with the clear understanding that, 
in order to do them, other things, 
which call perhaps with more clamorous 
voices, must be let alone. 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 4 1 

Again : we must recognize, in accord- 
ance with this principle of discrimina- 
tion as the first condition of the Realm 
of Order, that there are some things, 
which by our training and station we 
are fitted to do, and others which we 
are not fitted to do. How often it 
comes to pass, that we set our hand to 
some task or service, just because it has 
a sentimental side ! Or, again, how 
often is it that we yield to the im- 
portunities of a friend to associate our- 
selves in some enterprise, of which, if 
we were honestly to analyze it, we 
should find that that friend is himself 
or herself a largest part. Take that 
element out, and the thing does not 
honestly appeal to our intelligence, our 
judgment or our sympathies. The first 
duty under such conditions is to 
separate the work which comes to you 



42 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

with an appeal for co-operation or 
sympathy, from the mere personal ele- 
ment, which, in this life of ours, is 
often the most potent element in warp- 
ing and perverting our judgments. 
What we want to know about any 
work is, first of all, whether it is rela- 
tively worth doing ; secondly, whether 
it is a work which we can best do ; and, 
thirdly, whether it is the work, which 
being the work which we can best do 
and being relatively worth doing, of all 
other work, to-day, comes to us with 
most direct and strenuous call. 

Bring this principle of discrimination 
into your life, and how, straightway, 
confusion, and torment, and unrest will 
disappear out of it ! You know how it 
is in the home, where one gets up in 
the morning with a thousand petty 
cares appealing to her, and where there 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 43 

is not that calm judgment and delibera- 
tion first of all in the closet, as to the 
tasks of the day, which clears the air, 
and so steadies one with the sense of 
the supreme importance of things which 
are fundamental, and with the secon- 
dary importance of things not funda- 
mental. Who of us does not know 
from bitter experience, how, pulled 
hither and thither by conflicting 
thoughts, tormented all the day long 
by questions that we strive to answer 
and cannot, when the day is done, we 
sit down and fold our hands in the 
consciousness that it has been from the 
beginning to the end a failure, simply 
because in the beginning of it there 
was not a reference to and a reverence 
for this law of the Realm of Order, nor 
any wise discrimination as to the claims 
of relative duties. 



44 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

There is a very striking illustration 
of what I mean, in the sixth chapter of 
the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, 
when the infant Church, having grown 
out of its earlier feebleness, had come 
to have what it has to-day in such large 
measure, those dependent upon its 
eleemosynary care, needing the minis- 
tration of its alms. " In those days," 
we read, "when the number of the 
disciples was multiplied, there arose a 
murmuring of the Grecians against the 
Hebrews, because their widows were 
neglected in the daily ministration." ' 
The issue, as were all others, was taken 
to the Apostles. Now, the first in- 
stinctive line of action, for one who had 
not recognized this principle of dis- 
crimination in the ordering of his daily 
life, would have been for these Apostles 

1 Acts vi. 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 45 

to have gone down into the midst of 
this business of ministration and under- 
taken to correct the unfairness on the 
one hand, and the neglect on the other, 
in regard to the matter of the ministra- 
tion of alms to the widows of Grecians 
and Hebrews, by personal intervention. 
But with that inspired wisdom, which 
not only laid the foundation of the 
Church, but raised it out of its elemen- 
tary crudeness, the Apostle declares of 
those who were ordained to preach the 
Gospel, and to lay the foundations of 
the Church, that " it was not reason 
they should leave the Word of God and 
serve tables." Serving tables is not an 
unworthy work for us of the Ministry. 
If one comes to our door, it is not be- 
neath our dignity to feed him. But 
there are other forces and powers in 
the Church which can do this precisely 



46 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

as well as we can do it ; and if so, we 
are to recognize that there is such a 
thing as a law of discrimination ; that 
that which is greater is not to be neg- 
lected for that which is less ; that the 
concerns of the spiritual life are not to 
be overlooked for concerns of the tem- 
poral ; that the activities of the Church 
of God — often a danger in our days — 
are not to engross themselves with mere 
matters of outward ministry, so that 
they forget to dispense that godly coun- 
sel and those saving truths which are to 
be the primary powers in turning men 
from darkness to light. 

II. Again, there is a second condition 
of the Realm of Order — I mean, Subor- 
dination. The moment that we look at 
the infant Church, we find that in it 
there were what we call different orders 
of men. There were those who were 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 47 

Apostles ; there were those who were in- 
discriminately the first Elders or Bish- 
ops, those who were Presbyters, and 
those, like these of whom we read in the 
sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apos- 
tles, who were Deacons, and, as some of 
us believe, those also who were Deacon- 
esses. In other words, no sooner does 
the Church develop an order, than it de- 
velops a subordination in orders. And 
this law of subordination, which from 
the beginning the world has been trying 
to get rid of, it resents, it breaks out of, 
it throws over the wall, only surely and 
inevitably to bring it back again. We 
who are here are members of a society, 
and parts of a state, which calls itself a 
Republic : a protest we say, against 
those monarchical forms of government, 
with their investment of almost abso- 
lute power in the sovereign, which ex- 



48 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

isted in less enlightened days. But it 
is doubtful whether any sovereign in 
Europe has as much absolute power, 
especially in connection with the ap- 
pointment of subordinates, as is vested, 
at this very moment, in the President 
of the United States. In other words, 
we may call the form of government 
what we will, sooner or later it comes 
to this, that there must be some ul- 
timate dispenser of authority, some 
ultimate voice that shall give the 
word of command, in matters of duty 
and service, in every company, little 
or great. 

I am sensible that here I am speaking 
of a matter of great difficulty and del- 
icacy. How easy submission to rule 
would be, if authority were always 
exercised with wisdom, meekness, and 
love ! To yield to a sounder judgment, 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 49 

when its decisions are made plain to us 
in kindly ways, and without harshness 
or arbitrariness of tone, is not ordinarily 
hard. But when authority is exercised 
imperiously or dictatorially, to yield to it 
is sometimes almost impossible, even if, 
as under such circumstances we are 
tempted to believe, it is not actually 
wrong. And it is here that there often 
arises, therefore, one of the severest trials 
to temper and character, in such work as 
most of you are doing. It must needs 
be done, if it is to be done at all, in 
subordination to rule and authority, 
and at this point you in this church to- 
day, who are, whether as parishioners 
in a parish, or members of a religious 
society, or associated in some parochial 
fellowship, working under the general 
oversight and direction of some one 
over you in the Lord, must be aware 



50 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

of the difficulty of which I speak. God 
forbid that I should forget the fact, 
that those who are over us in the 
Church are men of like passions with 
ourselves, of abundant infirmities of 
judgment ; easily intoxicated, it may 
be, now and then, with authority ; self- 
willed sometimes, inconsiderate, not 
always wise nor thoughtful of others' 
feelings. But, in the case of men set 
over women, this is but to suggest the 
question, How can we expect that men 
shall always be stifficiently thoughtful of 
the sensitiveness of women, when they 
are not women themselves ? No doubt, 
oftener than otherwise, men are im- 
patient of suggestion, impatient of 
counsel or advice, even from those older 
and wiser than themselves, especially 
of women, just because it seems to them 
to derogate from their official authority. 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 5 1 

If my brother clergy were present I 
might speak of this matter with more 
frankness. Meantime, let us remember 
that this is a part of the inevitable 
friction of that condition of infirmity 
and sin in which the Church finds itself 
to-day. It is not greatly different, 
after all, with women or men. In the 
little parochial society, as every one of 
you knows, there are jealousies, because 
those at the head of the circle of work- 
ers are there, sometimes, for some very 
secondary consideration of wealth or 
influence, or of mere seniority in service. 
Now, we do not always name our- 
selves, or our own claims, in such a 
connection, but perhaps we say that an- 
other working beside us is so much 
better able to take the helm and steer 
the little ship, and set in array the 
battle, than she to whom the task has 



52 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

actually been entrusted. And then, 
when we are conscious in our work that 
this other set over us is not always 
considerate of our judgment or patient 
of our suggestion, that the briefer and 
the smaller the authority — alas, that it 
is so often so ! — the more strenuously 
it is asserted and the more imperiously 
shown — then I am bound to confess 
that acquiescence, submission, for the 
sake of bringing order out of confusion, 
is sometimes an extremely difficult 
thing to render. 

And yet it belongs to us to remember 
that there can be no service without 
submission, and that, however ignorant, 
self-willed or inconsiderate those may 
be who are over us in any work, it is 
possible for us, at any rate, to lift them 
up into a nobler capacity for their service 
of rulership, by two things : first of all, 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 53 

by the loyalty with which we acquiesce 
in an authority which has been rightly 
ordained ; and secondly, by the frank, 
unreserved candor with which we speak 
in love those thoughts of criticism or 
dissent, which, just because they are 
not told out into the ears of those they 
are meant for, rankle and fester, until at 
last they breed that bitterness out of 
which comes the failure of the whole 
enterprise. 

How different it would have been if 
at this or that point in some heated 
controversy, when we differed from one 
whose duty it was to conduct the work 
we did in common, we had first of all 
recognized the eternal righteousness, in 
a world and realm of order, of the prin- 
ciple of subordination, and then had 
striven to render our service as loyally 
to the constituted authority as we 



54 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

could ; and then, when we could not 
go further, had spoken to the other in 
frankness and in tenderness and love, 
instead of speaking of him behind his 
back, in bitterness and resentment and 
impatience ; for, just as truly as the 
Realm of Order involves, first of all, 
discrimination, just so truly it involves 
also subordination. 

III. And then the other and final 
condition of the Realm of Order, which 
after all is of supremest consequence, 
is Inspiration. A very striking book, 
11 Christianity in Nature, M which is one 
of the most suggestive disclosures of the 
witness to the religion of Jesus Christ 
which may be found in the world of 
nature that has been written in our 
own generation, uses, if I recollect 
aright, this illustration : 

The writer draws the picture of a 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 55 

stream running through the forest, be- 
side which there stands one day an 
explorer, who determines to build a 
mill. What is it that he must do in 
order that the mill which he builds 
shall grind his grain and do the work 
for which he has built it ? This : He 
must set his mill-wheel in the stream 
and current of the on-rushing tide, so 
that the law of gravitation which drives 
the stream onward in its course shall 
turn the wheel which his ingenuity has 
devised, with least waste of power and 
largest economy of his natural re- 
sources. In other words, unless he 
places himself in line with those divine 
increments of power which God has 
bound up in nature, he may build his 
machinery of costliest material and 
direct his mill with utmost skill, and he 
will have done both in vain. 



56 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

And so it is in our work for Christ in 
His Church or in the world. It is su- 
premely necessary for us to recognize 
that God is a God of order, that so we 
may put ourselves into position — we 
who are Christian workers — for His 
divine inspiration : adjusting our task, 
our whole order of life, our hours of 
service and rest, so that through them 
all there may flow that ever-quickening 
and ever-moving current of a divine 
life, which alone turns deadness into 
power and weakness into strength. 
Before us, as we sit here to-day, there 
is this altar of the Living God to which 
presently we are to draw near, for the 
strengthening of His Holy Sacrament. 
Ah, my sisters, when the indwelling 
power of that divine life does its work 
in us, what will be our service, our 
courage, our conquests! First and 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 57 

last, then, we are to recognize that 
submission to the Realm of Order 
means expectancy and waiting upon the 
Divine power, dependence on those 
treasures of grace which are stored in 
the everlasting storehouse of God. 

One word, in conclusion, as to what 
will be the sure fruits of this submission 
to the Realm of Order. First of all, 
we may count upon rest and peace. 
The difference between a life lived in 
accordance with the Realm of Order 
and one which is not, is the difference 
between anarchy and sovereignty, the 
difference between self-control and self- 
torment, between strength and weak- 
ness. Get your life into a divine order. 
Get it into affiliation with, and sub- 
mission to, principles of eternal law. 
Get it into dependence upon the divine 
strength ; and then what a new thing, 



58 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

when you rise in the morning, the day 
will be ! 

And next to rest and peace will come 
strength. Here is a heap of stones 
dumped down into the street. Imagine 
each stone instinct with life, and having 
it in its power to fling itself, in some 
wild way, into some other aggregate of 
atoms than that in which it finds itself. 
And then, imagine, on the other hand, 
that, conscious of the sovereignty in 
the world of the rule and Realm of Or- 
der, each one of these atoms takes itself 
and places itself upon certain lines, and 
upbuilds each one upon the other, step 
by step, in accordance with the eternal 
laws of construction, and you have in- 
stead a wall which shall stand the 
storms of centuries, and defy the hand 
of the strongest enemy. 

Just so it is, when we come to take 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 59 

our life out of the condition of chaos 
and bring it within the domain of the 
Realm of Order. When once you take 
your work, whether in the parochial 
society, or sisterhood, or in the street, 
out of the realm of confusion and bring 
it into the Realm of Order, with set 
time, with a recognition of things that 
are primary and secondary, with a rever- 
ence for a due subordination, then you 
have become straightway, not an ele- 
ment of confusion in the world, but a 
tower of strength, and men will look 
up to you, and lean on you, because 
they see in you that columnar quality 
which is the fruit of obedience to law. 

And then, finally, the last result of 
this submission to the Realm of Order 
is the great and blessed assurance that 
our work will have in it continuity and 
perpetuity. Ah ! how many people 



6o THE REALM OF ORDER. 

there are in the world — of how many 
of us here it may be true to-day — that 
with our aims wedded to some true 
and precious cause, to which we have 
given our strength and means and time 
— the fact that plagues us all the time 
is this : What will become of it when I 
am gone ? who will take it up and care 
for it and carry it on then ? I am but 
a waif, and the great world rushes on 
and wipes out the mightiest and hum- 
blest alike with its inevitable flow. 
What will be the fate of this little ef- 
fort of mine, this striving for God and 
some poor child of His, in the end ? 

I wish I could read to you just here 
the story of a young girl in England, 
who, moved by what she saw drink had 
done in a barrack town on the south 
coast, went alone into the places where 
there were soldiers and sailors, following 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 6 1 

them sometimes into the lowest haunts, 
following them with a persistence, a 
tenderness and a patience, that would 
take no denial, and waiting for recogni- 
tion through long years, until, slowly, 
out of her single-handed effort, lo ! it 
came. Just because, from first to last, 
having, all the while, a plan of her own, 
she was ready, as she said, at any mo- 
ment to lose herself in some larger plan 
for the work, that larger plan came 
and took her, and through her created 
one of the mightiest agencies for the 
reform of intemperance that is to be 
found in the Christian world to-day. 

It w r as because of the faith of such a 
woman as Sarah Robinson, holding on 
to the conviction that her effort was a 
part of God's own divine plan, holding 
on also to a clear and definite line of 
duty, until at last she was able to lose 



62 THE REALM OF ORDER. 

herself in a larger plan — it was because 
of this that her name has become im- 
mortal in the history of Christian ser- 
vice in our time; even as it was this 
which at first won a way into the 
hearts of those to whom she went and 
for whom she strove. 

So with you and me, whatever the 
task may be, and however small and un- 
known. If we begin it with a wise 
discrimination, continue it with a wise 
subordination, and above all, if we be- 
gin and continue and end it with a su- 
preme reference to a divine inspiration, 
it will not fail. Somewhere, some 
other heart will kindle into a flame for 
the sake of those for whom we labor, 
and our labors, long after we are gone, 
will endure because we have begun and 
continued and ended them in obedience 
to the laws of the Realm of Order. 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 63 

God's we are, God's we shall be in 
the world to come. His is the King- 
dom which is to triumph over all 
confusion. To redeem it from that 
confusion, His Son has come into the 
world. Let us draw near to Him, and, 
yielding up our life to His control, have 
every lawless and unordered thought 
and aim made subject to His Will ! 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

An Address delivered in the Church du Saint 
Esprit, New York, Monday, February 15, 1886, at 
the Service for Women engaged in Church work. 



6s 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 



OUR theme to-day is Ends and In- 
struments, and in the fifty-fourth 
chapter of the Prophet Isaiah there is 
a single verse which, as expressively as 
any other in the two Testaments, opens 
the whole subject for our discussion. 
That chapter, as perhaps you will recol- 
lect, is a part of the prophecy with which 
Isaiah is bidden to prepare the mind of 
Israel for that greater destiny which 
awaited it. In an age of national de- 
cadence, and in a time when a large 
part of its people were in captivity, 
God speaking to His Prophet, reveals 
to him that other and nobler future 
which awaited His chosen nation, when 
67 



68 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

led out of bondage they should know a 
perfect liberty, and when all the way 
along they should be conscious that be- 
hind them there was a Divine purpose, 
moulding and controlling events. And 
in pursuance of that thought, these 
words are put into the mouth of the 
Prophet : " Behold, I have created the 
smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, 
and that bringeth forth an instrument 
for his work," by which, undoubtedly, 
God designs to remind those to whom 
He speaks through His prophet, of two 
truths, equally pertinent and helpful to 
us who are here to-day. 

One of these is that general truth of 
His own sovereignty. Man is God's 
instrument. He acts under a Divine 
guidance and inspiration, even when, 
like Cyrus, the pagan king, he is not 
conscious of it, and this he himself illus- 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 69 

trates by those constructive powers of 
his, with which in turn he forges the 
instruments, which, like the smith's, are 
used for his daily work. 

Now if you have ever seen a forge fire, 
you have seen one of those things which, 
with the least interesting aspect exter- 
nally, become attractive, even instruct- 
ive, the moment that you recognize the 
processes which are going on there. If 
one were blowing the bellows and ham- 
mering a mass of iron, turning it to and 
fro with his hand as he did so, without 
an aim or object, the whole spectacle 
would be equally meaningless and gro- 
tesque. But as you watch the smith, 
you see the great mass of molten metal 
which he handles at the end of his tongs, 
under those successive blows of the 
hammer which he deals, assume, little 
by little, a definite shape. It may be a 



JO ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

plowshare that he is moulding, or a 
pruning-hook ; an instrument of peace, 
or an instrument of war. The thing 
that is significant is, that the crude metal 
is slowly becoming some sort of an in- 
strument. The expenditure of labor is 
not for labor's sake alone. Beyond the 
labor there is an end. In the eye and 
mind of the laborer, every step, every 
blow, is directed to a definite result ; 
and nothing is more interesting than to 
watch the way in which, out of the most 
hopeless and apparently obstinate mass 
of crude material, skill will sooner or 
later educe a tool which shall do the 
tasks of the world and subdue the ob- 
stinacy of Nature. 

But go a step further. Have you ever 
thought of that other tool — which has 
so much to do with the fashioning of 
the tool itself ? What is it that enables 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. Jl 

the smith to shape either the pruning- 
hook or the plowshare ? You say it is 
the thought which conceives those im- 
ages in his brain, and the will which re- 
solves to put them into execution. 
But a thought is an unborn child, and 
like any other unborn child, may never 
see the light. That which enables it to 
live is the act by which the thought is 
translated into some visible expression, 
and therefore behind the thought of 
the smith there must be the hand of the 
smith. He who worketh in the coals 
cannot think out and excogitate and 
will into being the plowshare or the 
pruning-hook ; there must be that other 
tool, that most marvellous of all instru- 
ments, I think, which we call the human 
hand. Was there ever in all the world, 
a tool, an instrument, like that ? We 
say that it cannot see, but in the case of 



J2 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

those who are without sight how truly 
it becomes " eyes to the blind " ! We 
say that it cannot speak, and yet a ges- 
ture will be sometimes infinitely more 
expressive than a word ; an averted 
hand will tell as much or more than the 
averted face and the most resentful 
speech. 

And then, think of the ministries of 
the human hand, as they apply them- 
selves to sorrow and suffering. We go 
into the darkened chamber of some 
friend, to whom, if we could, we would 
speak a word of comfort in a great sor- 
row, and the most we can do, and often 
the best, is by the silent, constant pres- 
sure of the hand, to give expression to 
a sympathy which words only blunder 
in telling, and which we convey far 
more expressively just because we tell 
it without words. Again : here is a 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 73 

wound ; how shall it be healed ? With 
medicine, you say. Yes, but what — as 
day by day we are being taught so 
wonderfully in this day of trained skill 
— what is there in the whole realm of 
material relief, so effective to bear upon 
pain and misery and bodily suffering, as 
the ministry of a human hand ? Watch 
a trained nurse bandage a limb, and 
then watch a philosopher attempt the 
same task. This deft instrument, this 
marvellous weapon, sensitive, strong, 
delicate, nimble, is of all other marvels 
in the world, it seems to me, in the way 
of instruments, the most marvellous. 

And what is it that makes it so ? 
Plainly, its adaptedness to its tasks. 
Think how tender it can be ! Consider 
how, in those processes of engraving 
which are the finest and most delicate, 
and which have to do with the manu- 



74 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

facturing of money or its equivalent — 
there is developed in the palm of the 
hand a sensitiveness so fine in the treat- 
ment of a steel or copper plate, that no 
agency which the wit of man has in- 
vented, has ever been able to take the 
place of that primitive touch. Think 
again, how the hand is adapted for 
tasks at once grave and delicate ; how 
it can hold or push or pull, with what 
gentleness it can touch a wound, and 
minister to a diseased body, almost as 
imperceptibly as the very breath of 
the air. What is it, all the way along, 
I ask you, that impresses us in this mar- 
vellous, this incomparable tool ? It is 
its adaptedness to the tasks which in 
this world God has given it to do. 

And that reminds us of that painful 
disagreement, that want of harmony 
between ends and instruments which, . 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 75 

in other and higher tools than those 
of the hand, is one of the most 
trying and disheartening experiences 
of life. We look at the work which 
we are doing ourselves, we look at 
the work other men and women are 
trying to do for Christ, and we recog- 
nize, very often, the most cordial pur- 
pose, the most honest consecration of 
gifts and talents, and as the end of 
them all, the most dismal failure. What 
is the explanation of the failure? It is 
often simply that, unlike the human 
hand, the instrument has undertaken a 
task for which it was not adapted. 

(a) This may come in many ways. 
In the first place, from want of native 
aptitude, a want, which, in taking up 
our particular work in life, whether it 
be a secular or a spiritual calling, is a 
matter far too little regarded. In the 



76 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

child that grows up under the shadow 
of our own teaching, there are qualities 
that differentiate him from any other. 
Here is the boy at your knee, whom 
you would fain see great at the bar or 
in matter of science. Here is the girl 
to whom you look, when she grows to 
womanhood, to lift off a little those 
domestic cares that have fretted you all 
through her childhood, and which you 
have borne patiently, thinking that one 
day they were to be divided with 
another. And she grows up with an 
exquisite sense of color, a singular 
genius for music, or for rendering some 
humane service to other people, but 
without the least adaptedness for those 
tasks which to you seem the most im- 
portant. And the boy whom you 
would fain have to love books and the 
paths of high emprise, finds his interest, 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. JJ 

it may be, in a piece of mechanism, 
develops tastes utterly alien to those 
which you yourself have, or that belong 
to any ancestor whom you can recall ; 
and then such an one has his life spoiled, 
perhaps, just because you insist upon 
coercing his native want of aptitude in 
a channel for which it was not ordained. 

To us who are here to-day, this ques- 
tion of aptitude is one which ought to 
lie at the very beginning of any Chris- 
tian work whatever. Our own native 
powers are a part of the endowment 
which God has given us for serving 
Him in the world. So far as we refuse 
to understand them, just in that de- 
gree, we shall be sure to go astray in 
any service that we undertake to do for 
Him. 

(b) And then, next to that mistake, 
there is the other and far commoner 



yS ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

one which we make, in undertaking 
any work given us to do, in spite of 
our want of training for it. Take the 
illustration which I have already used 
— of one who undertakes to dress a 
wound, or to minister to one who is in 
physical pain, without the education of 
the hand and the eye, which are the 
indispensable requisites for every such 
ministry. I might bring the brightest 
man in the world to sit beside the bed- 
side of one stricken down with some 
sore disease, and if he did not under- 
stand the relation of some simple rem- 
edy to the case before him, his wisdom 
and theoretical knowledge would only 
be an embarrassment in his ministra- 
tion. Discipline, education, that is, 
training, is the one element often which 
distinguishes failure from success. 
(c) Again, still another explanation 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 79 

of so much of the failure that we find 
in life and in our own work, in this 
matter of ends and instruments, is our 
habit often of over-taxing an instru- 
ment adapted for a certain work and 
abundantly well trained for it. What 
is more painful, when we look out on 
the daily life of a city like this, than to 
see so many people — yes, and as we go 
through the streets, so many brute 
beasts — on whom are laid burdens 
larger than they can bear ; whose are 
gifts, training, taste and predilection, 
but who are overweighed in the work 
they have to do, with a task so much 
too large for them, that failure in it is 
fore-ordained before they begin. 

Now, such facts as these, in connec- 
tion with that subject which we are 
considering here, of the adaptedness of 
instruments to those ends which they 



80 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

undertake to achieve, suggest to us the 
question, how are we to correct and 
avoid these specific evils and errors to 
which I have alluded ? 

I. In the first place — and it is a mat- 
ter of sincere thankfulness that more 
and more in our age that fact is being 
recognized — we are to correct the dis- 
proportion, the mal-adjustment of in- 
struments to ends, by a knowledge of 
our own gifts and aptitudes and charac- 
ter. What is wanted at the threshold 
of any task which involves persistent 
service, and looks forward to effectual 
results, is that you and I should, 
first of all, understand ourselves : what 
it is in the way of native aptitude that 
God has given us, and so, having taken 
account of ourselves, should understand 
the native resources at our command. 

II. And next to that, and no less 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 8 1 

important, is the matter of training. 
Here, again, we have much to be thank- 
ful for in that classification of work 
which is more and more a characteristic 
of our day. This is an age of special- 
ists, and if the work of the world is to 
be done, it must be by means of special 
endeavors. In other words, in the 
Christian service that we do for the 
ignorant, the relief of poverty, the ar- 
resting of vice, the saving of the fallen 
— in all these tasks that in our day 
have grown so large, to do them effec- 
tively, there must be in every case 
somebody who is willing, first of all, to 
learn how to do them, and who by 
training has learned the deftness and 
the skill which are the indispensable 
prerequisites of success. 

Some of you here this morning have 
had an experience in Sunday-school 



82 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

work. I wonder if any young girl, or 
any woman no longer a girl, looking 
back to such a time, can forget the first 
time when she sat down and confronted 
a Sunday-school class ? That sense of 
overwhelming helplessness that came 
upon her as she realized that she was 
set there in the office of a teacher ', and 
with the responsibility of not misleading 
minds in the understanding of the truth 
— how keen it was ! With the Word 
of God in her hand, she was to unfold 
its meaning to those that came there 
to learn at her mouth the way of the 
Lord. But how ? With what previous 
training ? I think we are bound to 
confess, especially we who are ministers 
of Christ, that oftener than otherwise, 
in the incompetency, the inadequacy, 
the utter unfitness, that exist in such 
cases on the part of the instrument, the 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 83 

responsibility belongs not so much to 
the young, unfledged, inexperienced 
teacher, as to those who, over her in 
the Lord, have set her to a task for 
which she is so poorly trained. Teach- 
ing — is it a natural gift ? to make clear 
to another the way of eternal life — is 
that a sort of thing which you can take 
up and put down, as you would take up 
a task in needle-work ? And so of any- 
thing else we are called to do for Christ, 
even though it be so humble as a task 
in needle-work — the very first condition 
on which we ought to insist with refer- 
ence to ourselves, or any others set to 
do Chrises work in His Church and for 
His children, is that there shall go be- 
fore it some sort of preparation. And 
therefore, when we are asked to under- 
take such work, it would be a wise pre- 
caution if we demanded of those who 



84 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

asked us, " How do you propose to 
enable me to do this work effectually ? 
Give me some sort of preliminary teach- 
ing and instruction which will fit me to 
do it to edification ; give me a school in 
which I can learn thus to serve Christ, 
and then I may be able to say that I 
will consent to do so." 

And here I want to call the attention 
of those to whom I speak, whose work 
may lie among the poor, to the great 
opportunities afforded them of educat- 
ing a body of helpers to reinforce them 
in their work, by taking along with 
them, for a time, those who are willing 
to serve Christ in this way, but who are 
held back because of inexperience. 
When we open the New Testament 
and learn the way in which the greatest 
tasks of all were attempted by the men 
to whom they were assigned, nothing 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 85 

is more significant than that on all 
the occasions of which we read, the first 
workers for Christ went forth two and 
two. The work of laying the founda- 
tion of the Church, the preaching of 
the Gospel, were done not singly, but, 
as a rule, with one more experienced 
and one less experienced worker, work- 
ing and moving side by side. Believe 
me, if we could establish that simple 
rule in the work we are trying to do, 
instead of isolating our endeavors so 
much as we do, the result would greatly 
inspire and surprise us. 

III. And then, finally, we are to 
recognize the fact in this matter of ad- 
justment of instruments to ends, that a 
most wholesome discipline in the edu- 
cation of any one of us, for any task 
which Christ calls us to do, is not so 
much success as failure. " Happy are 



86 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

the people," is a Hindoo proverb, 
" Happy are the people who began by 
failing." And it is a proverb of endur- 
ing truthfulness. As I stand here, there 
comes back to me the memory of a 
great thinker, whose services to the 
Christian religion we may well remem- 
ber, as we acknowledge the hospitality 
of this pastor and flock of French lin- 
eage, and whose name and work we may 
well honor, as placing us and our chil- 
dren and our children's children under 
enduring obligations. Who of you here 
this morning has not read the story of 
Blaise Pascal and the Port Royalists, 
that marvellous man, who, coming out 
of comparative obscurity, made the 
whole Church of Rome to tremble at 
the courage with which he challenged 
its errors, and who, in his Provincial 
Letters, has left a literature which, I 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 87 

venture to predict, will endure as long 
as the graceful and versatile and fervid 
tongue in which he wrote it? But do 
you know that Blaise Pascal, the phi- 
losopher, the Christian teacher, the re- 
former of an age, and almost of a Church, 
began his work as a boy of eighteen in 
a mechanic's shop, where he spent week 
after week and month after month in 
vain endeavors to manufacture a calcu- 
lating machine, the model of which was 
the germ out of which came that other 
and still more marvellous mechanism 
which we know as the calculating ma- 
chine of Mr. Babbage ? 

Now, then, when Pascal set himself 
to that task, he made not merely the 
one model, or two, or a dozen, but fifty. 
He made them in steel, he made them 
in brass, he made them in ebony, he 
made them in ivory. Baffled and de- 



88 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

feated at one time, he turned back to 
the very beginning, and went over the 
whole complicated business again and 
again and again. And though the in- 
strument, which at last he completed, 
never received the recognition on the 
part of the scientific world which he 
himself expected, thus dooming him to 
another disappointment, he was him- 
self, by that supreme discipline, that 
persistent and resolute endeavor, edu- 
cated to be an instrument in the hand 
of God of almost incalculable service to 
future generations. For, out of that 
baffled endeavor, out of successive fail- 
ures, stumbling and falling and beaten 
back, but refusing to be conquered, 
there came the spirit of resolute courage, 
which, when he had to face a hostile 
time and to challenge a hostile Church, 
gave him the clear insight, the resolute 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 89 

purpose, the almost divine persistency, 
which has made his name in the realm 
of Christian thought immortal. 

And this, my dear friends, lifts us to a 
higher and still larger view of the whole 
subject. You and I want to fit our- 
selves, in this matter of Christian ser- 
vice, to be instruments that shall 
accomplish an end. We want to know 
our native gifts, we want to cultivate 
them by a wise training, we want to be 
willing to humble and to discipline 
them into strength, by failure. Yes, 
but all the time, from the beginning to 
the end, we want to bear in mind this 
great, this precious and inspiring truth, 
that we ourselves are, after all, but in- 
struments, and that the end of our 
work is not in our hands, but in God's. 
There is a little book called " The Prob- 
lem of the Poor," in which you will find 



go ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

the story of Elspeth, a German servant, 
who, living on the east side of this city, 
and doing first a work of delegated phi- 
lanthropy for an invalid lady, took up, 
after her mistress had died, the work 
which at first she had done as proxy 
for another, and broadened and wid- 
ened it until it became a blessing to 
the whole neighborhood. Get the 
book, and read the story called " One 
Woman's Work," and see how, dominat- 
ing that humble but helpful life, there 
was this mightiest secret of service and 
motor of action, the consciousness that 
this humble instrument was a tool in 
the hand of God. 

You and I will go presently to the 
most comfortable and helpful Sacra- 
ment of the Body and Blood of Christ. 
And for what ? For this, that first of 
all we may put ourselves anew in the 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 9 1 

hands of One whose instruments we 
are. Let us be willing to lie still as 
His tools, in the Hand that is mightier 
than the human hand. And let us re- 
metnber, too, for that is the unspeak- 
able consolation, which, as a door 
turning on golden hinges, opens to us 
the fairest and most blessed vision of 
all, that if, here and to-day, the end 
and the instrument have been but 
poorly mated, if the best of us must 
feel, as who of us does not sometimes, 
how poorly matched he is with his task, 
and how too large are the burdens which 
he bears — for each there is coming a 
life and a service, w T hen the instrument 
and the end shall be perfectly mated, 
and when, in the presence and under 
the inspiration of a Divine Strength, 
the tasks, which, as we try to do them 
here, seem too discouraging, will come 



92 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 

to us with a new and gracious invita- 
tion, just because, there, in the better 
service, in the Perfect Presence, in the 
fellowship of a close and constant con- 
tact with our Almighty Friend and 
Helper, we shall see our work with per- 
fect vision, and touch, all the while, the 
Hand that gives us the courage and the 
strength to do it. 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

An Address delivered in the Church of the As- 
cension, New York, on Monday, March I, 1S86, at 
the Service for Women engaged in Church work. 



93 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 



OUR subject this morning is Illu- 
sions and Ideals, and I shall 
speak of it, as you can readily under- 
stand, of necessity, under those special 
limitations which connect it with this 
place and these services. 

In a thoughtful volume which I laid 
down the other day, there occurs a con- 
versation between two friends, provoked 
by that very natural enthusiasm which 
one of them had expressed, in regard to 
the advantages of living in this gener- 
ation with the larger light and knowl- 
edge and opportunity which have come 
especially to Christian people, through 
the manifold gains of this nineteenth 
century. 

95 



96 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

In answer to this his companion re- 
plies that he wishes he could join with 
his friend in that expression of enthusi- 
asm, but is constrained to confess that - 
he cannot. " Looking back from to- 
day," he says in substance, " there are 
ages which we call the Dark Ages, and 
which most of us have been taught to 
despise. They were ages of more im- 
perfect knowledge, and of abundant 
superstition, and they were, as a result 
of that superstition, sometimes ages of 
great cruelty and wrong. But, on the 
other hand, they were ages of a simpler 
and more childlike faith. They were 
ages when, if you choose, men had illu- 
sions in abundance, but were made 
happy by them ; when Heaven was 
nearer, when the earth was more inter- 
esting just because it was more myste- 
rious, and when life, girt about though 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 97 

it was by what we call a thousand fa- 
bles, was somehow a more fascinating, 
just because a more unintelligible 
thing. 

" We have torn away the mask to- 
day ; we have shattered the illusions 
of the past. Knowledge, with its in- 
satiable curiosity, has dispelled a great 
many of our dreams. The traditions, 
the superstitions, as we call them, of 
our ancestors, have vanished — are we 
happier for their loss ? Is it a gain to 
know so much ? Is it a real progress, 
at any rate in peace of mind, to have 
destroyed these earlier illusions ? Was 
not the childlike state, in its compara- 
tive innocence of evil, in its simple and 
confiding faith, on the whole a more 
blessed, more peaceful and joyous state 
than that to which we have come to- 
day ? " 



98 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

I. Now I think we can sympathize 
with that feeling, even though we may 
be ever so enthusiastic concerning our 
own times. No one who has passed 
the threshold of youthful life is igno- 
rant of painful experience — with most 
of us, alas, to be deepened as life goes 
along — of the decay of earlier illusions. 
If we go no farther afield than our- 
selves, what illusions have been shat- 
tered, to us who have come to the 
burden and heat of the day, concern- 
ing our own character, hopes, and pow- 
ers ! There was a time when we parted 
the portal and looked out at the world, 
kindled by some warm enthusiasm, or 
on fire with some great truth which 
had broken upon us for the first time, 
in the confidence that the tasks to 
which some clarion voice called us were 
the tasks for which we were abundantly 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 99 

adapted, and into which we had only 
to throw ourselves, to achieve certain 
victory. 

We know better than that now. If 
no other illusion has been shattered, I 
venture to affirm, that to most of those 
to whom I speak this morning, that il- 
lusion is at best a fading memory. We 
have learned that, whatever our courage, 
our daring, our profound faith in our 
own powers to achieve results, results 
are not in our keeping ; that the best 
enthusiasm, the finest fervor, may hurl 
itself against some old evil, may cry 
aloud in the market-place in most in- 
dignant protest, may lift up its hand 
and voice against some monstrous 
wrong, and may do it in vain. It is 
not enough that we are persuaded of 
our own powers and of the merit of the 
cause in which we are enlisted to make 



IOO ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

us victorious. We have learned that 
such a faith in ourselves is an illusion. 

And then, again, take that other 
phase of life, which consists not in 
achievement, but in resistance. Time 
was, when we were younger, more in- 
experienced, less familiar with the 
enormous power of evil, less set, it may 
be, in the place where the hot fires of 
temptation burnt upon us with most 
resolute force ; when the fall or the er- 
ror or the misstep of another, seemed 
to us not only incredible but shameful ; 
when we said to ourselves, and said it 
with an honest confidence : " If I had 
been there, and if that temptation had 
challenged me, if that hot flush of pas- 
sion had flamed up in my breast, I 
know I could have resisted it. I know 
how the evil thing would have been 
spurned ; I know that I would have 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. IOI 

been strong enough to come off a con- 
queror/' 

Our feet have slipped since then. 
The temptation has come and con- 
quered us once and again. It may 
have been some subtle habit that, little 
by little, has encroached upon us, until 
day by day it has been a hard fight not 
to yield ourselves wholly to the mas- 
tery of it ; some sin, that seems no 
greater than the sin of the tongue, like 
detraction ; but as the years have gone 
on, we have learned this lesson, that 
our own powers of resistance are not 
sufficient for all the emergencies of life, 
and that the strength in us, equal, as 
we thought, to cope with any tempta- 
tion, is, after all, too often an illusory 
strength. 

And then, yet again, in regard to our 
spiritual perceptions of God, our rela- 



102 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

tion to Him and the world that is un- 
seen. Ah ! once there was a time, 
when in fulfilment of those words of 
Wordsworth, that " Heaven lies about 
us in our infancy/' the realm of the un- 
seen seemed somehow more close to 
our childish dreams than the realm that 
is seen. How is it to-day? Has the 
unseen grown closer or more remote ? 
Is the realm of the spiritual more real 
or unreal ? Is not that faith which 
once seemed so clear and so firm, in 
danger its very self, sometimes, of be- 
coming to us an illusion of our child- 
hood, and the things which seemed to 
hold us fast, in danger of slipping 
wholly out of our grasp? Our very 
power of spiritual perception, which 
once appeared so vivid, is it not, in one 
word, in danger of perishing utterly ? 
II. And again. When we turn from 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. IO3 

ourselves to our work, how is it there ? 
You can remember, I fancy, every one 
of you, the time when you were first 
attracted to some interest or opportu- 
nity, and how it presented itself to you 
as the one exclusive claim of paramount 
importance in all the world. What a 
cause it was — whether of the ignorant, 
or the needy, or the outcast — was there 
any other work like it ? Above all, was 
there any plan like that in which you 
yourself had become enlisted for doing 
this work ? Was there not here at last 
the panacea that was to redeem the dis- 
orders of society, and uplift the fallen 
ones, and transform this old world of 
ours into a new Eden ? 

If you have gone a great way in the 
work you are doing, you have out- 
grown that illusion. You have found 
out, that, however opportune and ur- 



104 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

gent that work may be, it is but a 
small part, after all, of that manifold 
and many-sided service, by which the 
world in bondage of sin is to be re- 
deemed back again to the service of 
Jesus Christ. You have found out that 
your own methods are, after all, but 
very imperfect ; in one word, that your 
pet scheme for the regeneration of the 
race is largely an illusion. 

And still more, perhaps, when you 
turn to the objects of it. The little 
children you wanted to save, the poor 
and destitute you wanted to house bet- 
ter, the needy you wanted to relieve — 
ah, how engaging they were when they 
first came to your notice ! How real 
seemed the need, how genuine the hu- 
mility that presented itself in the per- 
sons of these deserving ones ! And 
then, one day, there comes an insincer- 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. IO5 

ity, and you find out that those whom 
you have been helping are not ingenu- 
ous in their poverty ; it may be that 
their poverty is not real, it may be 
that it is poverty allied to vice, and that 
everything you are doing to ennoble 
only conspires to degrade and pauper- 
ize ; in a word, that these your heroes 
and heroines of the realm of the poor 
are so many fantastic illusions, whose 
virtues are largely the creation of your 
own imagination. 

And so of the rewards of our work. 
There was a time when that work it- 
self was to us the keenest pleasure. 
In the beginning of it, in the first fresh- 
ness of the new love, you can remem- 
ber how you said to yourself, " Can 
anybody tire of this service ? What a 
charm there is about it, what a reward 
in the very doing it ! Only give me 



106 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

strength and courage, and my life will 
find its happiness in going in and out on 
such errands, and spending and being 
spent for Christ and His service." 

Said James Hinton, " Somebody 
asked me what I wanted to go and live 
in White Chapel for, and whether it 
was because I thought the nineteenth 
century needed a new illustration of 
martyrdom. I could not make them 
understand that those walks I took 
every afternoon in White Chapel, and 
the pleasure of sending my pictures to 
be exhibited among the most degraded 
people — that all this was itself a joy so 
keen and real, that I sometimes ar- 
raigned myself for the indulgence of 
what was a natural taste in me, and 
which found in their gratitude to whom 
I ministered, my best reward." God 
forbid that we should not find the same 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 107 

pleasure in our work. But, oh, if it 
would only last ! What a bright illu- 
sion vanishes, when we find out one 
day that the work once so sweet and 
gracious is so no longer ; when the con- 
sciousness of drudgery comes, and when 
that confident belief which was itself 
the most inspiring illusion of all — that 
in the service we should find not only 
the privilege of doing Christ's work, but 
a daily joy in doing it — is no longer 
true ; when we take up our task with a 
supreme sense of its weariness, and lay 
it down when the day is done, almost 
w r ith a sense of thankfulness. 

III. But all this, I think, we could 
endure, if it were not for the destruc- 
tion of those other illusions, which 
have so much to do with the happiness 
of most of us, in any service or any life 
in this world — our illusions concerning 



108 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

our fellow-workers. Here is somebody 
who has kindled our whole interest 
into a flame. Here is a book which we 
read, which brings to us the life and 
work of some one we long to know. 
Here is a personality which somehow 
or other has come to bear upon our own 
need, whose call has awakened us out of 
the lethargy of our old indifference and 
sent us forth to do God's service, with 
the feeling that just so long as we can 
watch that other and be kindled by the 
tone of her voice, and quickened by 
the inspiration of her leadership, we 
can go on without weariness and with- 
out discouragement. And then, one 
day, we come near and find that the fine 
gold is somehow dimmed. One day, 
this friend of ours is cold to us or pre- 
occupied, or what is worse still, seems 
selfish. We discover how along with 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 109 

these graces and powers of leadership 
and of inspiration, there is a large human 
element — it may be the love of adula- 
tion, or of power, it may be self-will, or 
self-seeking. No matter. As we de- 
tect the selfish motive, the dross among 
the gold, as we find that the rare sweet- 
ness can be clouded by fretfulness or 
impatience; that the character does 
not always ring quite true, that our 
hero, though his face be of gold, has 
hands of brass and it may be feet of 
iron, what a shock comes to us then ! 
How it seems as if not only our hero, 
our leader, our guide, were somehow 
unreal, or of the earth, but as if there 
could be nothing quite real, nothing in 
all the world that was not illusory, and 
as if, instead of holding fast to these 
inspirations which have come to us 
from contact with those whom we 



IIO ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

believed noble and unselfish, we must 
fling them all away. 

In the life of one of the most emi- 
nent servants of God, we find an an- 
swer to that state of mind, I think at 
once conclusive and complete. A great 
Apostle, speaking of his earlier ministry 
and his child-life, says of himself : 
" When I was a child, I spake as a 
child, I understood as a child, I thought 
as a child ; but when I became a man, 
I put away childish things." The child- 
life is the life of illusion ; the child-life 
is the life of half-lights, of imperfect 
knowledge, of imagination, supplying 
the place of that discrimination and 
that intelligent perception, which is the 
gift not of childhood, but of manhood 
and womanhood. 

Would we have it different? Nay, 
could it be otherwise, even if we wished 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. Ill 

it? As with the infant, the half-light 
is all that its childish eye can bear, so 
with you and me. Led on by its im- 
perfect rays to seek a clearer vision, it 
must needs be that that clearer vision, 
when it comes, shall often pain and sur- 
prise us. But it need not be the sur- 
render of our faith in goodness that shall 
come to pass, because of the dissipation 
of our illusions — nay, it ought not to 
be — but only the surrender of our idols, 
the emancipation from that earlier and 
half-pagan hero-worship which put a 
human being on the throne of the Di- 
vine, and then would fain bow down 
and worship it. Surely any experience 
of disillusion is better than that, no 
matter what it costs ; and when we see 
how such a process of disillusion, as in 
the case of the child, brings us closer to 
that which is the Eternally True, we 



112 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

may well hail it as a blessing in dis- 
guise. As it was with the Apostle, so 
it must be unto you and me. 

First, there is the child-sight, imper- 
fect, cloudy, ignorant, erecting its 
heroes into gods and goddesses, kin- 
dling itself into enthusiasm with its half- 
knowledge and half-imagination, and 
then the time comes when the knowl- 
edge is more perfect, and the illusion 
is revealed in its true character, and we 
discover how false were a great many 
of our perceptions of life and character 
and of our own work. But in such a 
crisis let us not mistake. What are we 
to do? We are not to throw away our 
faith with our illusions, and fold our 
hands in despair, and cry out that all is 
false ; but we are to remember that 
because, when we are children, we see 
as children, and understand as chil- 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. II3 

dren, for that very reason when we come 
to manhood and womanhood, we are 
to put away childish things. We are to 
accept, in other words, the trial, the 
probation, of half-knowledge ; and then 
we are to recognize that the shat- 
tering of our earlier illusions is but a 
stepping-stone first to a nobler and 
truer vision of service, and so to a loft- 
ier ideal of excellence in the doing of 
it. And just here let me again com- 
mend to your attention the story of 
Sister Dora. There are some lives of 
women who have given themselves to 
Christ and His service which have the 
more value just because they do not 
carefully exclude from their pages any 
honest delineation of those infirmities 
of character, which form a considerable 
part of the noblest natures. And, in 
the case of Dora Patterson, the power 



114 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

and the helpfulness — I speak at any rate 
for myself — of that book has largely 
been that it is a story of a woman of 
infirmities of character, with a hasty 
temper, with an intense love of power, 
with a very strong hunger for admi- 
ration for which confessedly again and 
again she did things, who, neverthe- 
less, in the midst of this dross mixed 
with the gold, carried all the way so 
high a purpose, ending a noble life at 
last so sweetly and serenely under the 
discipline of pain, that to have known 
her, environed by her infirmities, and 
yet mastering them at last, is infinitely 
more helpful and inspiring than to have 
seen her in that half-light and mediaeval 
coloring which would have made of her 
a saint and not a woman. 

No, we are to remember that the 
things that are earthly must needs par- 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. II5 

take of the earth. We long, oftentimes, 
for an example, a leader, a personal 
friend and companion, who shall be so 
free from human infirmities that no- 
where, at any point, is there anything 
to shatter our illusion and discourage 
our idolatry. It is just here that we 
must distinguish between an illusion 
and an ideal. There is an ideal excel- 
lence, but it is an ideal excellence just 
because, under the conditions in which 
you and I live and work to-day, it must 
of necessity be impossible for it to be a 
merely human excellence. We would 
fain bring our ideals down here into the 
work-day world, and make them a part 
of our common life, and get our inspi- 
ration by that sense of touch and sight 
and hearing, which comes from holding 
on to the hand of an earthly friend. Do 
you not realize that the moment you 



Il6 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

bring them down into this work-day 
world, they must needs partake of its 
infirmities and shortcomings, and that, 
just in so far as they are merely human, 
they must live and err under merely 
human conditions? 

No ! The longing in itself is right 
and noble, but it is given to lift our 
hearts, no matter by what painful 
struggle, from earthly idols to the One 
Ideal that can never fail, and will never 
disappoint us. 

And what is this but to state in other 
language that which Jesus Himself 
stated on the morning of the Resurrec- 
tion when she who had known Him in 
the flesh, and longed to cling to Him as 
her ideal in the flesh, came and flung 
herself upon His feet, to be bidden 
back with those lofty words : " Touch 
Me not, for I am not yet ascended to 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. I I 7 

My Father." She was to touch Him 
again, not with the hand of flesh, but 
with the hand of faith, and so she was, 
by that upper life, lifted far above her 
own, to be drawn out of this lower life, to 
let go the illusions of her ignorant past, 
and to see in them the prophecy of that 
Divine Ideal, which was to be hereafter 
her highest inspiration and her truest 
strength. Remember just here those 
words in the Collect for Ascension-Day : 
" Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty 
God, that like as we do believe Thy 
only begotten Son our Lord Jesus 
Christ to have ascended into the Heav- 
ens ; so we may also in heart and mind 
thither ascend, and with Him continu- 
ally dwell." You have lost your earlier 
illusions. Do not bemoan them. Step 
by step, as you have gone on in your 
work, one and another of those earlier 



Il8 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

faiths in your work, in your opportuni- 
ties, in yourself, in your fellows, it may 
be, have been shattered and crumbled. 
Remember that all these fragments, 
these broken lights of virtue of which 
you get a glimpse here in one character 
and there in another, but which are 
united in perfect symmetry and com- 
pleteness in no human life — that these 
exist in order that you may lift your 
aspirations above them to that Ideal 
Excellence that once walked the earth 
awhile, incarnated in Jesus Christ, risen 
and ascended now to His Father and 
your Father, who is in Heaven, and 
real to you to-day, only as you " thither 
ascend in mind and in heart, and with 
Him continually dwell." And so, let 
these vanishing images of our earlier 
illusions be not the discouragements to 
an earnest service, but the ladder by 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. II9 

which we climb up to it. Out of the 
ignorance, out of the misapprehensions 
of your past, try to come a little closer 
to Him, who is the one perfect Ideal of 
excellence — Jesus Christ. 

When she was ministering at Walsall 
in a hospital, one day, a poor miner 
over whom she bent, said to Dora Pat- 
terson, " I want, Sister Dora, to make 
a confession to you." " Make it then," 
she said, with her imperious abruptness, 
11 make it." Even then, as she bent 
above him, her head was bound up be- 
cause of a wound she had received from 
a stone thrown by some unseen hand, 
when returning from a visit among the 
poor. " I was the man," he said, " who 
threw that stone ; I cannot endure not to 
tell you of it, when I see you minister- 
ing thus tenderly to me." " My dear 
fellow," she said, " don't you suppose I 



120 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 

knew it ? I have long ago gotten over 
my earlier illusion that the poor always 
love their helpers. God forbid that I 
should not serve you, because it has 
been shattered. " 

And so with you and me. God for- 
bid that we should not serve Him in 
the image of any of His creatures, be- 
cause our illusions have been shattered ! 
Out of these vanishing dreams of the 
past, let us rather come closer into the 
presence of the One Excellence, and 
find it in our perfect, our sufficient 
Ideal. 



WHOLENESS. 

An Address delivered in St. George's Church, 
New York, Monday, March 15, 1886, at the Service 
for Women engaged in Church work. 



121 



WHOLENESS. 



IN concluding the series of services of 
which this is the last, I shall depart 
from my usage hitherto on occasions 
like this, and say little, if anything, of 
your work. I want this morning to 
speak to you of yourselves, and in the 
sequence of the thought suggested by 
the last theme that occupied our atten- 
tion, to speak to you of yourselves as 
instruments to be used for the work of 
God in the world. Indeed, I think that 
if you will reflect a moment, you will 
recognize how little is any such concep- 
tion of our work as is expressed by the 
word " wholeness " possible to us here 
and to-day. 

123 



1 24 WHOLENESS. 

" Wholeness " — what do we mean by 
the word? Certainly we mean some- 
thing that is unlike fragmentariness or 
partialness ; and yet, what view of our 
work is possible to us without recogniz- 
ing the characteristic of fragmentariness? 
Take for example, the work which the 
Church is doing in a great city like this. 
We may well, in this inspiring presence, 
take note of that which is being done 
here, where an old, and so to speak, 
largely disused shell has been made, 
under a new touch, to be filled with life 
and potent with influences for good to 
a degree for which we are all equally 
glad and thankful. How manifold it is 
in its activities ! How untiring the zeal 
and energy of him to whose hospitality 
we are indebted for our service this 
morning, and of those associated with 
him ! And yet the first thing the rec- 



WHOLENESS. 1 25 

tor of this church would say to you, if 
standing in my place, would be, after all, 
to own that any such work as this, large 
and many-sided as it is, with reference 
to the needs of a community so vast as 
ours, can only be fragmentary and par- 
tial. Think of the twelve or thirteen 
hundred thousand people who live in 
New York, and then consider how im- 
perfectly at best, the Church, whose 
children we are, can reach and rescue 
them. We must content ourselves — it 
is a part of the condition of things un- 
der which we are working — to do our 
little segment of work, to do it with all 
our hearts, and then to confess that it 
is but fragmentary after all. 

On the other hand, when we come to 
turn from the work we are doing to the 
workers, what is it, which, as we read 
the New Testament in the record of 



126 WHOLENESS. 

those marvellous recreations of power 
and restorations of faculty which are 
characteristics of the miracles of Christ, 
is more clearly indicated than this, that 
howsoever fragmentary our work may 
be, we ourselves were not meant to be 
fragments, but each one of us a whole? 
It is just here that the Christian re- 
ligion, standing over against ancient 
art, has so large a significance. You 
remember those figures of women called 
caryatides, which are a frequent feature 
of antique architecture, and which are 
introduced often in connection with 
some vast facade instead of columns, 
to support entablatures. That was the 
conception of art, because, first of all, 
it was the conception of pagan human- 
ity. There was a widely-prevailing 
view of human beings which regarded 
them as no more nor better than beasts 



WHOLENESS. 1 27 

of burden, useful so far as they had a 
pair of strong shoulders, and under cer- 
tain pressure could stand up and resist 
and bear, and that was all. But the 
moment we come into the presence of 
Christ and the work He does in the 
world, we see how entirely His concep- 
tion of human nature contradicts that ; 
how from the beginning to the end of 
His earthly ministry, where there is im- 
perfectness, where there is absence of 
faculty, where there is primitive denial 
of power, as in the blind man's case, or 
in the case of the deaf and dumb, He 
restores it. Surely in the case of such 
restorations, there is enormous signifi- 
cance in that side of them which re- 
veals Christ's work as making human 
nature whole and human powers sym- 
metrical, as denying the doctrine that 
a man or woman is to be content with 



128 WHOLENESS. 

certain partial powers, leaving others 
equally undeveloped and barren. We 
have a phrase when we speak of people 
who are incomplete, which, just here, 
is most expressive. Here is some one 
full of zeal and energy in his calling, 
absorbed in his daily business with an 
ardor so keen that nothing can discour- 
age it. How the man holds on to one 
purpose, and pushes himself and all his 
powers in one direction ! But touch 
him on the side of humanity, appeal to 
those instincts which ought to be in 
him to love his fellow-man, or try and 
kindle in him some noble aspiration for 
a life above the seen, and you knock at 
a door which is closed. Now, I say, we 
have a phrase in regard to such people 
which is singularly descriptive. We say 
of a man like that, "he is but half a 
man," something in him has been left 



WHOLENESS. 1 29 

out. That which makes completeness, 
that which makes symmetry in charac- 
ter, is wanting ; and in describing one 
thus as half a man, we describe him 
truly. 

I. And so it belongs to us, in connec- 
tion with the topic I have suggested 
for our reflection, to ask ourselves what 
that is in personal character which 
makes what we call wholeness or com- 
pleteness. And in undertaking to an- 
swer that question this morning, I shall 
not disdain to begin very low down. 
When I touch your hand, when I hear 
the sound of your voice, I come in con- 
tact, in the one case or the other, with 
something which is the only means 
which you have of translating to me 
that which is in your thought. In other 
words, it is through those physical pow- 
ers and endowments which God has 



130 WHOLENESS. 

given to us, that we make ourselves in- 
telligible to other people. Shut them 
all up, and one might be a genius in his 
intellectual gifts, but would be power- 
less to influence his fellow-men. It is 
through this wonderful organism which 
includes the senses and the sense powers, 
that the intellect and the spirit of man 
reveals itself to its brother man, and it 
is the vigor and wholeness of this physi- 
cal organization which alone makes 
greatly possible the errands and the 
services of mercy on which God calls 
us to run. 

What now is just here the danger 
especially of the sex to which I speak 
this morning? I think it is a twofold 
danger, and, as such, almost universal. 
On the one hand, if a woman at the 
outset of life has natural gifts and 
charms, that perilous endowment which 



WHOLENESS. 131 

we call beauty, then there is a strong 
temptation to minister to the physical 
side of her nature, not merely to pam- 
per herself by indulgence, but to con- 
sider those things that contribute to 
the adornment of the body, and relate 
to the mere flesh and what may be 
called mere fleshly potency. There is 
something appalling, when one remem- 
bers the errands to be done in the world 
by woman, in the thought of the time 
that some women spend on something 
no better than the beautification of their 
persons, letting the mere decoration of 
the body engross so large a thought and 
absorb so much of their time, that when 
the day is done, and the neglected 
duty that called them at the beginning 
of it stands over against them with ad- 
monitory mien, they are constrained to 
remember that they have failed because 



132 WHOLENESS. 

of some prettiness of toilet trifling, or 
some thoughtless folly, which ate into 
the purpose and finally ate up the day. 
And then again, on the other hand, 
there is that other danger, and there is 
urgent reason for speaking of it, which 
comes to women exempt from the temp- 
tation to which I have already referred, 
who, because they may not be richly 
endowed with physical gifts, despise 
the care of the body. We ought surely 
to be emancipated in this century, after 
the dark pages in the Church's history 
which are behind us, from the follies, 
which, in the name of Religion, men 
and women have committed in the 
neglect and torture of their own bod- 
ies ; and equally emancipated from the 
folly of supposing that godliness con- 
sists in debility or dyspepsia. Is it not 
a mechanism of God's own handiwork 



WHOLENESS. 1 33 

that we are neglecting? It is a cruel 
wrong to a gift of God, no less sacred 
than the gift of the intellect, even 
though not so high in its powers, if we 
abuse the body He has given us, by 
disesteeming its soundness or neglect- 
ing its welfare, when, by a simple care 
for the rudimentary principles of health, 
we might keep this physical instrument, 
whose powers for ministering are in 
proportion as it is in a healthy condi- 
tion, well-tuned. The world is cursed 
all around to-day, just because men and 
women have been neglectful and indif- 
ferent in the care of their physical 
health. How the home has had its 
peace shattered and the day spoiled by 
some mean and bitter word — the fruit 
of some vicious heart or brain? No, 
but of some detestable mal-condition of 
the body, which could be cured if we 



134 WHOLENESS. 

would only recognize the sacredness of 
the instrument God put in our power 
for His service. 

Surely, between the two extremes 
of idolatry of the body and neglect of 
the body, there is a golden mean. It 
is possible not to make an idol of the 
body, but a complete instrument of 
service, to develop that lowest side of 
you if you please, but even so to make 
yourself more and more a whole woman 
by the way in which you respect the 
laws of health, and thus to reverence 
that which was made to be the temple 
of the Holy Ghost. 

II. But again, you have an instru- 
ment infinitely finer than the body. 
There is something in you, that, as in 
old Latin phrase, says intelligo : I know, 
I perceive, I understand. There is 
something in you that forever differen- 



WHOLENESS. 1 35 

tiates you from all the orders of beings 
below you, however men may try to 
make them like you by their training, 
and which only shows more and more 
that you are not a brute. Each one of 
you, if she has used her own mind even 
in the most imperfect way, has become 
conscious of this threefold fact : First 
of all, that she has powers of percep- 
tion. The mind recognizes truth, dis- 
cerns a fact ; there is something in it 
which, like the hand, is prehensile, and 
that takes hold of that which appeals 
to its reason and its intelligence. 

Next in order is that power of the 
mind which we call the power of com- 
parison. The child begins to exercise 
it by a subtle intuition, as soon as it 
begins to think at all, and just as an 
infant learns the difference between 
great and small, so as we go on we are 



136 WHOLENESS. 

meant to learn, by the exercise of this 
power of comparison, the distinction 
between great and little things, and 
also the distinction between things that 
are true and the things that are false. 

And then, binding these other two 
powers, the perceptive and the compar- 
ative, together, there is what we call 
the reflective power, which, alas! in 
this age of ours, is the least exercised 
of all ; the power, which wants to be 
disciplined, and developed, and which, 
in connection with the highest themes, 
bids us away out of the hurried thor- 
oughfares of life, to be still, and sit for 
a little while with the busy hands and 
feet in perfect repose. This is our 
mind. The power that perceives, the 
power that compares, and the reflective 
power that crowns them all with the 
act of meditation, and so seeks, as Ba- 



WHOLENESS. 1 37 

con says, to know a thing by " thinking 
through it " — the highest dignity I can 
conceive of the intellectual nature. 

Now what is the characteristic of the 
age in which we live, as regards its men- 
tal attitude ? It is an age of very slen- 
der and shifting beliefs, an age in which 
the opinions of yesterday in no individ- 
ual case, as a rule, are sure to be the 
opinions of to-morrow. It is an age in 
which we are wont to find people moved 
out of their old moorings, and there are 
more people, I believe, than confess it 
even into the ears of their most inti- 
mate friends, who have been moved 
away from all positive beliefs whatever. 
But if this is so, I charge such a condi- 
tion of things, wherever it is found, 
quite as largely as upon any other in- 
fluence, upon the influence of what I 
would call intellectual laziness, a curse, 



I38 WHOLENESS. 

I think, of our generation, greater in 
proportion than in any that has pre- 
ceded it, certainly for two hundred 
years. We turn back and think of our 
fathers and of the narrowness of their 
faith ; yes, it may have been narrow, 
but what a hold they had upon the 
truth they believed, what a power it 
was in their daily life, just because they 
had gotten that strong grip upon it, 
which comes, and can only come, from 
the exercise of the threefold intellec- 
tual power, which God has given to 
every one of us. 

How many of us now, in this genera- 
tion, can say that our beliefs are mat- 
ters of strong conviction, that our 
opinions, whether in regard to letters, 
or art, or religion, are things which 
we have reached by " thinking unto 
them " ? Rather, how many of us 



WHOLENESS. 1 39 

have accepted these things by tradi- 
tion? Undoubtedly, we may not dis- 
esteem traditions, but the degradation 
of our intellectual condition in the nine- 
teenth century, as I regard it, is this, 
that the traditions on whose authority 
we hold things, are so often so con- 
temptible as compared with the tradi- 
tions that bound our ancestors. Though 
it is true that many of them were only 
creatures of traditions, their traditions 
had the dignity of antiquity, and came 
trailing down through the glory of past 
ages, ennobled as being the beliefs and 
opinions of men and women who had 
suffered and died for their faith. 

But ours — where did we get them, 
and how noble and how saintly, and 
how worthy of the position of leader- 
ship, have been the men and women in 
their thought and lives from whom we 



140 WHOLENESS. 

often derive them ? Believe me, we 
could do no better service to our own 
souls than over against this one word, 
wholeness, to strive for intellectual com- 
pleteness, to ask, on what grounds do I 
hold truth ? and to seek to discipline 
and call into action the power in us 
that thinks, and so develop a more 
clear understanding, whether of the 
truths of nature or of revelation, by the 
exercise of the powers God has given 
us, wherewith to take hold of them. 

III. And then, finally, wholeness 
means supremely the exercise and the 
development of the spiritual faculty, or 
what I would call, as the Bishop of Cen- 
tral New York, in a very remarkable 
sermon, which I would that I might 
put in the hands of every one of you, 
described, some years ago, as the 
" Faith Faculty." 



WHOLENESS. 141 

In the Gospel, according to St. Luke, 
there is a description of the healing of 
the ten lepers by Christ, and the return 
of one of them, after he had been healed, 
to pay homage to his Healer. In that 
case, when Christ had cleansed the lep- 
ers, He bids them go show themselves 
to the priest and render the offering 
Moses has commanded. And then we 
read that " one of them, when he saw 
that he was healed, turned back, and 
with a loud voice glorified God. 

"And fell down on his face at His 
feet, giving Him thanks : and he was a 
Samaritan. 

" And Jesus answering said, Were 
there not ten cleansed ? but where are 
the nine? 

"There are not found that re- 
turned to give glory to God, save this 
stranger. 



142 WHOLENESS. 

" And He said unto him, Arise, go 
thy way : thy faith hath made thee 
whole." 

Whole — a profoundly significant word 
just here. The others had done what 
He bade them do, and they might have 
replied in answer to Christ's criticism, 
that He Himself had told them to go 
and show themselves to the priest, 
though He had not indeed forbade 
them to thank Him. But the signifi- 
cance of His word to this one Samari- 
tan lies, if I read it aright, in this, that 
while the others had got what they 
wanted and gone away in the joy of it 
— as so many of us do when we get 
what we want, forgetting the Giver in 
the gift — this one turned back to Christ, 
to pour out his heart in gratitude to 
God. And then what happened ? 

Have you ever asked yourselves that 



WHOLENESS. 1 43 

question ? Ah ! I think it was, that, 
as he looked up into that Divine coun- 
tenance and heard the tones of that 
incomparable voice, there smote upon 
his soul for the first time the Vision of 
the Divine ! Into his heart there broke 
at last the sense of God, and so he flings 
himself at Jesus* feet — in gratitude ? 
Yes, but most of all in adoration. And 
that therefore is what Christ meant by 
saying his faith had made him whole. 
He was a clean man before, cleansed 
of his leprosy, but when at last there 
woke in his breast that consciousness 
of the Divine, when at last he saw his 
Lord and owned Him, when the Faith 
Faculty, in other words, was born out 
of impotence into life, then, he became 
a whole man ; not half a man, with his 
physical powers and his intellectual pow- 
ers alive, but dead on the Godward 



144 WHOLENESS. 

side, but a whole man at last, because 
his "faith had made him whole." 

Blessed be God for such a word as 
that to us who are here to-day. It is 
not wholly an age of indifference in 
which you and I live, it is not an age 
of want of reading or culture, or want 
of talk about religious things — I some- 
times think there is too much of this 
in the pulpit and out of it — but it is an 
age of unfaith, because, while we live 
so largely upon traditions — whether of 
the neighbor who lives next door or 
the prophet who spoke a hundred years 
ago, it does n't make the least differ- 
ence — what we believe and affirm is 
second-hand ; and the Faith Faculty 
is a thing to a great many people, so 
far as its loftiest exercise is concerned, 
all but unknown. 

We believe " the belief " — the Creed. 



WHOLENESS. 145 

Is not that faith? we ask. Rather I 
maintain, faith is vision, the unsealing 
of the spiritual eye-sight, that power in 
you and me which turns the dome of 
brass into the open door of Heaven, 
and which makes us to behold here in 
this work-a-day world the form of Him 
who walks among the golden candle- 
sticks, and bends above all His workers 
with inexhaustible sympathy and love. 
That is the faculty which in this age 
we need most of all to have awakened, 
and in what may be called a caricature 
of it in our time, I seem to see a kind 
of protestantism of faith, which may 
well be of significance to you and me. 
We are many of us much pained by the 
extravagance of that religious phase of 
the hour, which concerns itself with 
what are called Faith Cures, and God 
knows nobody has less disposition to 



146 WHOLENESS. 

disesteem human agencies in connection 
with the work of healing than I, or to 
recognize the fact that in God's work 
to-day for sickness and misery in the 
world, he expects His children, their 
hands and eyes and feet and minds, to 
be, with other natural gifts, instruments 
of working His cures among men. But 
when, in accordance with the spirit of 
an age that believes so much in the 
seen and so little in the unseen, men 
exalt physical remedies into the place 
of the Divine Providence, when they 
disesteem prayer so largely in the case 
of sickness and suffering as to disregard 
it altogether, when it is hard in so many 
cases, to get people, in connection with 
the miseries of this life, to place their 
dependence on the help and love of a 
Heavenly Father, I don't wonder that 
there rises up a sect, if you choose to 



WHOLENESS. I47 

call it so, which, with its inevitable re- 
action against this state of things, be- 
lieves in being cured solely by the 
exercise of faith. It is a modern phase 
of Protestantism, which has its profound 
significance and which we may not dis- 
regard. 

For, all the way along, work as we 
will, command as we may the skill of 
the ablest physician, what we do from 
beginning to end is conditioned upon 
what God does. And so, whether we 
are ministering to the body or the soul, 
whether our work lies among ill-venti- 
lated homes, or in the midst of ignorance 
and prejudice and rebellion against the 
law of God, let us remember that the 
thing which is to make you complete 
women, not fragments, but whole for 
Christ and His service, is most of all 
the Faith Faculty, that sees your Lord, 



I48 WHOLENESS. 

that hears His voice, and that holds His 
hand. Says the Apostle, " Ye are com- 
plete in Him!' Expressive word ! This 
is the whole womanhood that we 
want. 

In taking leave of you, with thank- 
fulness for the privilege of having met 
you for these past few months, I could 
offer no better prayer for you or the 
work you are doing for your Master, 
than that, in that work, you may each 
one of you illustrate a whole woman- 
hood, rounded and complete and sym- 
metrical, healthy in body, acute and 
vigorous in mind, but above all, up- 
ward-looking and expectant in Faith, 
trusting in the Leader who leads you, 
confident, because of the strength which 
He alone can give. 

May He go with you as we part to- 
day. May He follow you in all the 



WHOLENESS. 1 49 

ministries and services that wait before 
you, and so make each one of you com- 
plete in Him, " Who is the head of all 
principality and power" 



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Treatment Date: Oct. 2005 

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A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 
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